A few weeks ago, during an internal strategy discussion at Brand of a Leader, we kept circling back to a question clients have been raising more and more lately:
“How exactly does earned media help my business today?”
It’s a fair question, and an increasingly common one.
When the economy feels uncertain, people naturally want clearer answers about where their money is going. They want to understand how a podcast appearance, an article feature, or a media mention actually translates into growth, visibility, or new business.
The honest answer is that it works differently than it did a few years ago, because the internet itself works differently now.
For a long time, online visibility was understood almost entirely through traditional SEO: backlinks, rankings, keywords, search traffic. The playbook was fairly simple. Get enough credible websites linking back to you, and over time your visibility climbed.
But AI search is rewriting those rules.
Tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI-powered search are moving past backlinks as the main way they decide who counts as an authority. They are reading for expertise, context, and credibility, and they are looking for signs of genuine thought leadership scattered across the internet.
That single shift changes what earned media is actually worth.
The Internet Is Moving From Links to Authority
One of the misconceptions I still hear most often is that a media placement only matters if it includes a direct backlink to your company website.
Increasingly, that is just not how discoverability works anymore.
AI search engines crawl the plain mentions of companies, founders, executives, ideas, and expertise across credible publications and platforms. Even with no hyperlink at all, being named alongside a respected publication builds visibility, because AI tools read that association as a credibility signal.
In other words, we are drifting away from an internet built around links and toward one built around authority.
It’s a meaningful difference. Many high-authority publications now structure their sites with “no-follow” backlinks, which means they are not passing traditional SEO value the way they once did. A few years ago, that might have made those placements feel less valuable from a pure marketing standpoint.
Today, AI search reads value differently. It pays attention to a handful of things:
- who is being talked about,
- where those conversations are happening,
- how often a name keeps coming up,
- the depth of the content and the level of expertise behind it,
- and the caliber of the environments it appears in.
So a respected placement can still sharpen your discoverability, even when there’s no link attached.
As Stefano Faustini, Co-Founder of Brand of a Leader, put it during that discussion:
“This is the new SEO.”
And more and more, it is becoming the foundation underneath modern visibility.
Marina Byezhanova, our other Co-Founder, shared something with the team recently that reframed this for me. Recent analysis has found that somewhere between 90 and 95% of the citations AI tools rely on come from sources other than a brand’s own website. The brand-owned page, the one most companies pour their energy into, is rarely where the AI engines are actually getting their information.
And it tracks with what other studies are showing. One analysis of more than 21,000 brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity found that for discovery-phase questions, brands were 6.5 times more likely to surface through third-party content than through their own domains. The credibility that moves the needle is the kind that comes from outside validation, and nearly all of it is rooted in thought leadership, which is exactly the work we help our clients do.
Why Thought Leadership Is Becoming More Important
Here’s one of the clearest shifts happening right now: AI strongly favors people over companies.
Executives, founders, operators, and subject matter experts are becoming the real engines of discoverability, because AI systems are built to surface expertise, and expertise lives in people.
When someone asks ChatGPT who the leading experts in a space are, who they should follow, who actually understands a problem, or who keeps showing up on a particular topic, the system goes looking for patterns across the internet. It looks for the same person being associated with the same area of expertise, again and again.
Which means thought leadership has become a discoverability strategy in its own right, well beyond its old role as a branding exercise.
The leaders who consistently put meaningful ideas and perspectives into the world are building a long-term advantage, because they are creating exactly the kind of signals AI search is designed to reward.
Visibility Compounds Across Multiple Touchpoints
One of our longest-standing clients already has what most people would call strong visibility. She runs a successful business, has a well-developed personal brand, posts consistent thought leadership on LinkedIn, and is active across executive networks and philanthropic foundations, all of which generates real credibility and exposure on its own.
From the outside, you could easily assume she had already “done enough.”
We still encouraged her to write an article within her niche, which happens to be the beverage industry, and we placed it in a highly respected publication in that space.
Why bother, when she was already so visible?
Because visibility today is built across trusted touchpoints that reinforce one another, not through any single channel on its own.
The article gave her third-party credibility, because it positioned her expertise inside a publication her industry already trusted, and that kind of external validation almost always lands harder than self-promotion. But it did something else too. It tied her name, her expertise, and her company to relevant industry conversations that both AI and traditional search engines can crawl, reference, and connect over time. Even where the backlinks are limited or structured differently than old-school SEO relied on, those mentions still feed her digital authority.
It also handed her another high-quality asset to point to across LinkedIn, sales conversations, networking, and future outreach.
That’s the part people tend to misunderstand about earned media. The real value builds slowly, through an accumulation of credibility signals that keep reinforcing who you are, what you’re known for, and why your expertise is worth trusting. A single article, backlink, or lead is only ever one small piece of it.
Why Podcasting Has Become So Powerful
One of the more interesting threads in all of this is how strongly AI favors conversational content.
AI search runs on questions and answers. And podcasts are built entirely around questions and answers.
That is a big part of why guesting has become such a powerful visibility tool. Hosts ask the same kinds of questions people are now typing into AI tools, and guests answer in long-form, nuanced ways that show expertise, perspective, and lived experience.
When those conversations get published, they spread across a whole range of places: Spotify and Apple Podcasts, YouTube, the host’s website, show notes, transcripts, and social clips. Every one of those becomes another touchpoint reinforcing the link between a person and their expertise. From an AI visibility standpoint, a single podcast appearance can spin up an entire network of credibility signals at once.
Transcripts have become especially valuable here. AI systems can crawl the full conversation, understand the context around a person’s expertise, and carry those insights across platforms. In a lot of ways, podcasting mirrors exactly how modern AI search works, and that’s precisely what makes it so effective.
Earned Media Works Differently Than Traditional Marketing
The tricky thing about earned media is that its impact tends to be cumulative, showing up over time rather than all at once.
With paid ads, you can usually trace a result back to a specific spend. Earned media rarely works that cleanly, and you often can’t tie one article or podcast to a single lead.
But visibility compounds.
People will often consume your content without ever publicly engaging with it. They search your name, read your articles, listen to your podcast appearances, and notice your expertise turning up across credible platforms, all without leaving a trace you can measure.
And increasingly, the buying decision is mostly made before anyone ever reaches out. By the time someone books a call, they have usually researched you at length and already formed a view of your credibility and authority based on whatever they could find.
Earned media is what shapes that invisible decision-making. It builds trust before the first conversation even happens.
Visibility Is Becoming the Foundation
The leaders who get the most out of earned media tend to be the ones who keep showing up in credible environments with thoughtful perspectives clearly tied to their expertise. Volume online matters far less than that kind of steady, credible presence.
That kind of presence creates momentum. It strengthens referrals, sharpens discoverability, and raises the odds that an AI tool surfaces your name when someone goes looking for expertise in your field. And it compounds over time.
At Brand of a Leader, we keep telling clients that personal branding and earned media now sit at the center of growth strategy rather than off to the side of it.
Because in a world where AI increasingly decides what gets surfaced, recommended, and trusted online, the leaders who invest in their visibility today are the ones who will keep being found tomorrow.